Proud, Not Primitive!

Imagine this scenario. You have your own dreams and ambitions,
and you want to live your life a certain way. You want to choose
when to marry, and who to marry. But all of a sudden - from
nowhere – your family decides that they should decide for you,
and force you to marry someone else: someone much older, someone
you’d never want to marry if the choice was yours to make.

How would that make you feel?

Quite like this – except on a much larger scale – there are
schemes to bring tribal populations in India into the
“mainstream”. What gives any community a right to decide that it
falls under the “mainstream”, and another community falls under
the exception? Is it fair at all for one group to decide for
another?

With strong answers in the negative for these questions, is a
campaign by Survival International that puts human rights in the
right perspective by one underlying message: that tribal rights
are human rights, indeed.

Did you know that the Jarawa are among the richest communities in
the world? If you thought that wealth was best measured in
monetary terms, think again: what use is money if you have to
spend it for everything? In the words of Lodu Sikaka, who has
been quoted in the campaign, “It’s crazy when these outsiders
come and teach us ‘development’. Is development possible by
destroying the environment that provides us food, water and
dignity? You have to pay to take a bath, for food, and even to
drink water. In our land, we don’t have to buy water like you,
and we can eat anywhere for free.”

Right from our terms of reference – in calling tribal people
backward, primitive or even underdeveloped – to our treatment of
tribal people, we have consciously been disrespecting communities
together at once.

Think about your life, and the lives of the people around you.
How territorial we are as a people, right? It’s always “my
phone”, “my computer”, “my book”... and even “my space”. Why is
it so difficult for us to respect the right of the tribal people
to what is rightfully theirs? Why do we scramble to snatch what
they rightfully own, and stamp our idea of “development” on them?

If you feel as strongly as I do about this cause, if you find
yourself as guilty as I do of being negative in referring to
tribal people with terms such as “primitive” and “backward”, and
if you belong to the community of the world that silently watched
as tribal groups were forced to deal with our idea of
“development”, join me as I join Proud Not Primitive.

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